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If you were a bright kid in high school and college, there may have come a time when you decided between pursuing a career in law and a career in medicine. True, these are the two professions that the majority of parents wish for their children, but in most ways they're extremely different. For example, you have train much longer to become a doctor, and it helps if you can stomach the sight of blood!

There is one thing that law and medicine have in common, though. Society frowns upon doctors and lawyers who talk about extracting the maximum possible profit from their practices. Doctors who want to make a lot of money are somehow seen as “preying” on desperately ill patients, while lawyers come off as no better than shysters and pickpockets. What's especially galling about this situation is that doctors and lawyers usually emerge from school with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt; if they're not allowed to make money, like other people, how can they possibly pay back their student loans, much less make a decent living?

If you're going to be an effective attorney, step one is to abandon the notion that “profit” is a dirty word and one unbecoming the profession of the law. We live in a capitalistic society, and every citizen has the right—within reason—to earn a profit, assuming you earn that profit legally and ethically and not by short-changing or underserving your clients. In fact, profit is a good thing, since a monetary cushion will allow you to devote 100 percent of your attention to clients, rather than worrying about how to send your daughter to college.